The Royal Color

Dr. Oz highlighted the health benefits of purple vegetables today on his show. These beauties rank high in antioxidants. Purple cauliflower, potatoes and carrots are not the usual produce available at supermarkets, but with the health benefits, perhaps we should request our grocers to carry them. According to Lilian Verner-Bonds, in her book Colour Healing, purple foods promote leadership and heal erratic emotions. She also reveals the characteristics attributed to colors in the purple family:

Deep purple = arrogance, corrupt power, delusion, ruthlessness.
Violet= a rebuilder of hope, intuition, sense of destiny
Amethyst=mystical connections, idealism, protects the vulnerable
Mauve=makes the right choices, aristocratic, dynastic
Plum=old fashioned, pompous, full of false pride, boring
Lavender=perceptive and fragile, elusive, aesthetic
Lilac=a bright personality, vanity, glamor, romance, adolescence

She goes on to say that "purple flowers placed near you when you are working relieves eyestrain. Also, she advises us to use purple sparingly for it is a "heavy" color which, when used in excess, may be depressing. On its positive aspects, she says purple is useful for any kind of internal inflammation and for subduing palpitations of the heart. It is a good color for head problems; it is the chakra color for the brain. The immune system and jangled nerves can benefit from this color. Should you suffer from an overload of purple, the antidote is exposure to gold in the form of gold lighting, decor or clothes."

Just think, King Midas may have been trying to overcome excessive purple exposure while he played with his gold!

From other research and reading, I have concluded that plum/purple/violet have different personalities:

            Plum is sullen and sumptuous, on the dark side, an intriguing combination of red, blue and black, the deepest color in the plant palette. Taking on more red, more blue, even more black, it becomes many shades and tones. Claret, maroon, burgundy, mulberry, puce, all fit into this color group. The word plum seems to encompass all these tones. For the fruits themselves range from the almost black of a sloe or the rich, deep purple of a damson plum to the paler mulberry shades of a Victoria plum. It seems fitting that plum also means first class, treasure, and prize.

            As with red, textiles and fabrics of plum and purple have long been associated with wealth and opulence, empire and papacy. The dyes used to create these gorgeous hues were obtained only with great difficulty and expense. The Cretans, Phoenicians, Greeks, Romans and Egyptians knew the secret. The dye for the Tyrian purple of antiquity was extracted from the soft tissue of certain shellfish, notably of the genus Murex. 10,000 shells  yielded only one gram of dye.

The purple silk sails of Cleopatra's royal barge certainly impressed Marc Anthony; they were a blatant symbol of her immense wealth. Other Romans envied her power and  plotted to overthrow her so they could rape her country of its riches. Unfortunately, they prevailed against the purple-loving monarch.

Roman emperors alone had the right to wear clothes dyed purple and was associated with supreme power in cultures from Israel to Persia. Ancient texts tell us of its irresistible attraction among the upper echelons of society and of the emperors' relentless refusal to allow others to use it. Nero went so far as to punish offenders with death.

The complex process by which murex shells produce their purple dye has been reconstructed. The coloring molecules are similar to those of the indigo plant. The dyes varied with different types of mollusks. This is noted by Pliny, who remarked that the northern Mediterranean murex gave a different color from that of the south. Dye baths were manipulated to alter color. Sometimes two baths were used, each with a purple from a different source. This was expensive. Later, murex was replaced in the second bath with less expensive kermes (red) and indigo (blue). With the fall of the Roman Empire, much of this technical knowledge was lost.

Color in Silks-Identification with a color

Silks

Modern race fans are able to follow a horse's progress during a race through the use of some relatively new inventions:the race program, television monitors, the number on the horse’s saddle cloth and the track announcer's call.
But when horse racing first began in the early 18th century, there were no such things as program numbers, public address systems or closed-circuit television systems. So when King Charles II of England first assembled race meets on the plains of Hempstead, the dukes and the barons had trouble figuring out which horse was which. So, they adopted racing silks - or COLORS - to distinguish their jockeys for easier viewing.

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Today, jockey silks are more colorful than when racing was really considered the "Sport of Kings." Photo: Churchill Downs

During the time of King Charles II, the silks were simple -- red for one duke, black for another duke, orange for one earl, white for another earl,* and so on.
The tradition of the silks remains today as jockeys wear the colors of the horse owners, but because there are so many owners, silks have become even more colorful.

Some of the most famous silks are the devil's red and blue of Calumet Farm, worn by the jockeys of Kentucky Derby winners Citation, Whirlaway and Ponder and Allen Paulson's star-spangled red-white-and-blue colors, carried by the champion racehorse Cigar.

The jockeys' room at Churchill Downs houses hundreds of silks which are hung on pegs in the order of each jockey's races for that day. You can see a sampling each racing day by watching the jockeys as they enter the paddock ready to meet their mounts.

Article and photo courtesy of Churchill Downs

*Hierarchy of titles for nobility et al.

PRINCE (son or grandson of a king or queen
DUKE (British nobleman holding the highest hereditary title outside the royal family)
MARQUIS (Nobleman ranking next below a duke)
EARL/COUNT (Called count for a time after the Norman conquest. The wife of an earl or count is a countess)
BARON (A member of the lowest grade of nobility)
BARONET (Ranks below the barons and is made up of commoners, designated by Sir before the name and Baronet, usually abbreviated Bart., after)

Enjoy the races. I might pick the "winners" by their colors! I hear they have added Sapphire Blue to the silks this year and that there will be 19 horses in the race.

May---Artists' Birthdays

Artists’ Birthdays-May

1^st Jules Breton, French, 1827

George Inness, American, 1825

Alexandre Antigna, French, 1817

Peggy Bacon, American, 1895

Richard Lippold, American, 1915

Jacob Riis, American, 1849

2ndFrederic Edwin Church, American, 1826

Thomas Dewing, American, 1851

4^th Charles Drouet, French, 1836

Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, German, 1880

5^th Felix Saturnin Brissot de Warville, French, 1818

6^th Bacciccio, Italian, 1639

Alphonse Legros, French, 1837

7^th Francois Pompon, French, 1855

8^th Paul Wunderlich, German, 1927

9^th Jean Baptiste Carpeaus, French, 1827

Salvador Dali, Spanish, 1904

Jean Leon Gerome, French, 1824

Alfred Stevens, Belgian, 1823

10^th Edward Lear, British, 1812

Dante Gabriel Rossetti, British, 1828

Frank Stella, American, 1936

11^th Georges Braque, French, 1882

Joseph Stella, American, 1877

12^th Thomas Gainsborough, British, 1727

13^th Richard Avedon, American 1923

Jasper Johns, American, 1930

Carlo Maratti, Italian, 1625

14^th John Sell Cotman, British, 1782

15^th Maxime Emile Louis Maufra, French, 1861

16^th Stefano della Bella, Italian, 1610

Janet Fish, American, 1938

17^th Jacob Jordaens, Flemish, 1593

Gaston Lachaise, French, 1886

Claude Vignon, French, 1593

18^th Henri Edmond Cross, French, 1856

Johann Gottfried Schadow, German, 1764

19^th Albrecht Durer, German, 1471

Henri Rousseau, French, 1844

20^th Mary Cassatt, American, 1844

Marisol, American, 1930

Hubert Robert, French, 1733

21^st Franz Kline, American, 1910

Jean Pradier, French, 1790

22^nd Georg Raphael Donner, Austrian, 1693

Emmanuel Leutze, German, 1816

Philip Perlstein, American, 1924

Jacopo da Pontormo, Italian, 1494

23^rd Will Barnet, American, 1911

Carlo Dolci, Italian, 1616

24^th Philippe de Champaigne, French, 1602

25^th Giovanni Antonio Guardi, Italian, 1699

Pierre Legros, French, 1629

Paulus Pontius, Flemish, 1603

George Roualt, French, 1871

26thAlexandre Calame, Swiss, 1810

Carl Larsson, Swedish, 1853

27^th Edme Bouchardon, French, 1698

28^th Alexander Archipenko, Russian, 1887

Biographies of these artists are available at Wikipedia. If you have a simultaneous birthday with any of these artists, it will be fun to research their work. Perhaps you have something in common.

Ready for Red

Red

Red is the attention getter of the color world. In visual psychology, it is an advancing, expansive hue that looks heavier than others. It has the longest wavelength of any color in the spectrum. This, together with its associations with fire, life blood, and energy, makes it symbolically the strongest color.

On the other hand, red is one of the most positive of all colors in worldwide symbolism because of its associations with festivity, vitality and life itself.

It is representative of luck in China, where it became the emblematic color of the Chou dynasty (1045-256 BCE). As the color of blood and life, red is sometimes used with protective symbolism. The red beauty spot worn by some Asian women has this meaning. Some Chinese wedding guests take baskets of red-dyed eggs to the newly married couple to wish them luck in starting their family.

The darkest reds, such as burgundy and maroon connote rich, stately feelings. Red’s positive keywords are stimulating, exciting, energetic, powerful, dramatic, beautiful, passionate, sensual, vigorous, diligent, appreciative and reviving.

Christian theology envisaged nine angelic orders. The ones nearest to God were seraphs, usually painted red. Artists imagined them bearing six wings. In his thunderous warning of the wrath of the Lord to the kingdom of Judah, the prophet Isaiah informs us of the red dye technology of the Holy Land in the eighth century B.C.

                        Though your sins are like scarlet,

                        they shall be as white as snow;

                        though they are red as crimson,

                        they shall be like wool.

Here, these hues, scarlet and crimson, are used in the ancient text to evoke blood.

In the Middle Ages the color was called kermes, from the Sanskrit word kirmidja, “derived from a worm.” The Hebrew name for it was tola’at shani, “worm scarlet.” The red compound is extracted from a wingless scale insect Kermes vermili that dwells on the Scarlet Oak in the Near East, Spain, southern France, and southern Italy. The dye is extracted by crushing the resin-encrusted kermes insects and boiling them in lye. Kermes is the linguistic root of the English crimson and carmine and the French cramoisie.

Cochineal, (Coccus Cacti) an insect native to Mexico and Central America, was imported to Spain by the conquerors. For centuries, the secret was kept under threat of death for anyone revealing the source, as the Spanish profited from the vivid colored textiles this insect allowed. Finally, the British defeat of the Spanish Armada enabled Queen Elizabeth’s navy to carry home the prized cargo captured from the Spanish. It took the invention of the microscope to assure scientists that Cochineal were insects, not seeds. Cochinealwere imported to Texas for the purpose of controlling the over supply of prickly pear cacti. A similar program was very successful in Australia. It takes about 70,000 tiny insects to make up a pound, but a cupful will dye a pound of wool. Fresh insects make the brightest color.

            Dactylopius coccus is a scale insect, from which the cochineal dye is derived. D. coccus itself is native to tropical and subtropical South America and Mexico. This type of insect, a primarily sessile parasite, lives on cacti from the genus Opuntia, feeding on moisture and nutrients in the cactus sap. The insect produces carminic acid, which deters predation by other insects. The carminic acid can be extracted from the insect's body and eggs to make the red dye.

Cochineal is primarily used as a red food coloring and in cosmetics. The cochineal dye was used by the Aztec and Maya peoples of Central and North America. Produced almost exclusively in Oaxaca, Mexico by indigenous producers, cochineal became Mexico's second most valued export after silver. The dyestuff was used throughout Europe, and was so highly valued that its price was regularly quoted on the London and Amsterdam Commodity Exchanges.

Today, the highest production of cochineal is by Peru, the Canary Islands and Chile. Current health concerns over artificial food additives have renewed the popularity of cochineal dyes, and the increased demand is making cultivation of the insect an attractive opportunity in other regions, such as in Mexico, where cochineal production had declined again due to the scale insect having numerous natural enemies.

            Negative red connotations are brutal, lecherous, prejudiced, harsh, bullying, obstinate and dishonorable. It is the color of blood, which is associated with the emotions and is, therefore, symbolic of both love and hate.

To the Chinese, “Red eye disease” is their description of an envious person’s malady. Red, the color of sovereign power among the Romans has a similar meaning in the dress of Catholic cardinals. Red was used as a symbol for martyrdom during the Roman persecutions.

Red’s Color Properties

            “Red spells passion, power and pizzazz. Clear is the message, unmistakable the impact. Red is stop lights, fire engines, blood. Everyone understands exactly what to expect from red; it attracts attention, it creates drama. Simply looking at this color stimulates the body into an adrenalin rush, in preparation for danger. Physiological studies indicate that red lighting leads to a rise in blood pressure, body temperature and rate of breathing. Little wonder that red is considered a hot color since it really does create heat. Saturated red has the longest wavelength of any color in the spectrum visible too humans, and invisible infrared waves, next to visible red, actually are heat waves.

            Unrestrained and vital, red is always a stimulating visual pleasure. Many people are as timid about using red as they are about using orange and caution is often advocated. Red need not be fire-engine scarlet, harsh or glaring; red can be moody or voluptuous, as sensuous as silk velvet. Red is altogether too lively and energetic to be treated as the rebel or outsider in color schemes. Those who genuinely shy away from its dynamism might first try using it as an accent and gradually learn to love it.

            Red has always been associated with position, importance and riches. The red button on the hat of a mandarin of the first class, or the red hat of a Catholic cardinal indicates their importance.

In his desire for this significant color, man once went to extraordinary lengths to obtain it and such were the difficulties involved that it was always expensive. One important book about the pursuit of cochineal dyestuff is The Perfect Red by Amy Butler Greenfield. She weaves a fascinating story of how empires rose and fell because of this color.

In the search for this beautiful color, many things were tried. One source was the bodies of dried cochineal insects, another was the dried roots of plants like madder, a third, dyewoods like brazil-wood. The insects had to be gathered, the plants cultivated and harvested, the trees felled and chopped before the lengthy process of preparing the dye could even begin.

In the mid-nineteenth century, the development of aniline dyes based on coal tar brought red within everyone’s reach. Many expressions and color names remain as echoes of its natural origins. Another insect, Kermes vermilio, the source of the most ancient recorded dyes, gave its name to carmine, crimson and vermilion, and red tape derives from the tape used to bind legal documents together, formerly colored with a dye obtained from safflower.

According to W. B. Yeats in Fairy and Folk Tales of the Irish Peasantry, ‘Red is the color of magic in every country. The caps of fairies and musicians are well-nigh always red.” Red, warm and exciting, has certainly long been associated in interiors with entertainment or theatre. Walls draped in red damask, red velvet curtains, the red light of the brothel, all captured the dramatic.

The British National Trust range of paints, based on original colors from early properties, includes Picture Room Red, Eating Room Red, and Book Room Red, indicating the wide ranging domestic use of this color over the centuries.”

The quote above is from Nori and Sandra Pope’s gorgeous book Color in the Garden

COLORS: The Story of Dyes and Pigments - 

The Etymology of Red

A color as expensive and precious as red has dozens of shades and tones, each with its own name.

Auburn: red-brown; from the Latin alburnus; in the 15^th century, a whitish brown color; later, by association, a red-brown.

Brazil: red; probably from the Spanish brasa, glowing coals; the color obtained from the dyewood of the same name.

Burgundy: wine red; named for the wine from the Burgundy region of France.

Carmine: a deep crimson; related to crimson, from kermes, from the Arabic qirmizi.

Carnelian: burnt-orange red; from the Latin carn-flesh; originally a chalcedony stone with a deep red or flesh color.

Cerise: a bright red with purplish tones; from the French word for cherry.

Cinnabar: a warm red; red mercuric sulfide dye (the same material as vermillion); from the Greek kinnabari, from an older Oriental word.

Coquelicot: poppy red; from the French word for poppy.

Cresol: a brownish red; from the chemical name for coal tar, from which the aniline dye is made.

Crimson: a deep red tending toward purple; from the medieval Latin carmesinus or kermesinus, a red dye made from kermes; kermes derives from the Arabic qirmizi, red dye…

See pages 46-147 for the complete list

A Perfect Red by Amy Butler Greenfield 

Inspired by Red

by Barbara Boothe Loyd

This attention-getter of the artists’ palette,

an advancing, expansive color with the

longest wavelength of the color spectrum,

it connotes blood universally.

Ages ago the Greeks linked it with their

war god Ares’ power and strength.

Today, they dye Easter eggs this

hue to symbolize eternal life.

Picture Poinsettias’ ablaze against mud-brick

houses along the roads in Mexico.

The contrast of this vibrant color

And neutrals kindles our eyes.

Teeka powder enlivens the

faces and hair of

Nepalese brides, as their

Female attendants powder

Them in joy, symbolizing

The rosy future wished for.